


Marigolds and Cranes

by DIYFerret



Category: Iron Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Race Changes, Kid Tony Stark, Race Issues, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Issues, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony-centric, probably steve/tony if you squint, you know me and my gay ass
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-18 03:56:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8148356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DIYFerret/pseuds/DIYFerret
Summary: Nearly half a century on this earth and Tony Stark hasn't found a way to say he isn't just another playboy millionaire genius white kid jackass. Because one of these, as it turns out, is a pretty big lie.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Mariel, who is a beautiful and wonderful person and gets me and my ramblings better then any one else. Here's for you, Stark Kid, across the world and yet so near and dear for me.
> 
>  
> 
> I might force myself to write all the over changes I'd thought of for the Avengers, lets hope I can do it without adding Stony hahaha I'm weak.

Stark is a Scottish name, he's told. Strong, unyielding- the name of men who stand tall, who don't turn to comprises, men with conviction and fortitude and will. It's a short name, a barked syllable, a hard vowel ad harsher consonants. It's a flourish of a pen, a large headline, legacy and innovation all in one.

It's a pretty fitting name, Tony thinks, walking though a hollow hall lined with the portraits of old white men long since passed, and he wonders where his Father saw it, when he chose it, but not why.

 

 When Tony is young, maybe two or three, he has a nanny names Maricela. She is a round woman, and warm, an accent that enthralls Tony and cookies that are a chalky sweet and sticks to his mouth underneath the powder sugar and dry nuts. She speaks to him in limited English, but even then he was fast, too smart and too clever to let language be a barrier- he picks up her words, her language, quick as anything else he does, calls her Tia and laughs when she calls him Mijo. He loves her whole heartedly, the way children love, unguarded and pure. She fills his days, his nights, and for a while he sees her more then his own father, mother, both too busy inventing and touring and building to have time for something as simple as a child.

But Tony doesn't think about that, really, because Tia is here, and she cooks him rice stuffed with veggies and meat so red it stains yellow, and she gives him chocolate that is spicy in the good way, and she sings him songs and they light candles, sometimes, in front of a picture of a baby.

“Who is that?” He asked, sitting on Maricela's lap as she placed some flowers in a glass next to the candles.

“My baby,” She replied. “She passed away a long time ago.” In her room, the smell of the marigolds are overlaying all. “We light candles for the dead. So they can see them where they are.”

And those are Tony's earliest memories, beyond the imprint of emotions and vague feelings of action. But he does vividly, with striking detail, remember the day his father and mother had returned home to find him building a circuit board. And he had been so excited, he'd greeted his father with a rapid fire of Spanish, not even looking up until his father had wretched him off the ground and slapped him. He slapped him another time, and another, until his mother was screaming for him to stop, and Tony was too stunned to do anything but stare at his father's red face and realize he was- scared.

“Don't you ever speak that again. Do you understand?”

And Tony hadn't even answered, Howard already stalking off and screaming for Maricela. And his mother had taken her handkerchief out and tried to soothe tears that stung his skin.

Maricela had been fired that day, kicked out before he could even say goodbye to her. By the time news of Tony's circuit board was given to the press, he'd been given to the supervision of a couple of different people, always professional and distant, and then pretty soon he was studying or building, and then he was in college, and then everything was like a fast track to becoming a Stark, leading science and invention and building a better tomorrow.

It's years later, long after his parents had died and shortly after he makes the suit, that he tracks Maricela down. She resides in a peaceful patch of grass, next to her daughter, and both their headstones are filled with the remains of candles and flowers, a Mexican coke and a baby bottle and colorful angels and saints around. He splits the large bouquet of marigolds between them, and rest awhile, tells them about everything that's happened in rolling r's and soft vowels.

 

(One time, Tony had been working through the night on a project, and decided to actually eat something before he passed out on caffeine and stale popcorn. When he'd crept his way to the kitchen at 3 in the morning, he'd seen his father slumped out on the counter, a nearly finished bottle of whiskey and a photograph clutched in his hand. Tony had hid himself behind a doorway and watched his father argue at a piece of paper.

“I did what was best. I made sure I could make it- my Italian's shit, you know that? 'Close enough' my ass, never fooled Rogers or Barnes- but I made it, you asshole, and Tony's gonna make it too, he doesn't need to go through all that shit, Chingate, you're fucking dead anyways, you don't get to say how to raise my son, you're fucking dead-”

And Tony had crept back, once his father had devolved into a slurred mess of English and Spanish, sat in his bed and thought about his father knocking back drinks with a 'Salut'.)

 

When people talk about Legacy, they always talk about his father. Howard Stark, after all, was the genius, the inventor, the savior of the arms race and one of the men who helped win the war. When Tony is told about legacy, it's about Howard's- no one asks him about his mother, how she might feel, what her dreams where for her son, if she had any.

To most, Maria Stark is the name of a foundation, a concept only- Maria Stark helps people, protects people, and while Tony may be the one doling out the funds, its her name that reaps the benefits, not his.

Tony thinks that maybe he gives his mother more credit then she might be due. He doesn't remember her around a lot, in his early years. She'd been just as absent, and it wasn't until much, much later that he'd begun to see her on a regular basis. Nothing like everyday, no, but much more then he might see Howard.

When Tony thinks about his mother, he thinks- he thinks about long black hair, thin and pin straight in the rare moments she didn't twist it up. He thinks about her small smile, how small she was, thin and pale and beautiful. He thinks about eyes- how she's hold his face and bush her thumbs against his the corner of his lids, and how her own eyes had the smallest scars on them, so thin you could miss them if you didn't look hard enough.

He thinks about hindsight- how her contributions were all but buried, her research in nuclear fusion a misdirected footnote for so long. He thinks about how young she was, compared to his father, and how aged she'd looked, how tired she'd always been. He thinks about how she had, no likely or maybe about it, ended up in a loveless marriage and a fruitless job and settled with a child she'd probably never wanted. He thinks about his expectations, and hers, and he wonders who got more of the short end.

-But he also thinks about at the end, when she'd started opening up- when he'd come back from college for breaks and see her there, the awkward mix of becoming something between a friend and a parent to him. Tony thinks about the cake she would make for Christmas, always smiling to herself she she rolled it with precision and care, and how light it felt on his tongue. He thinks about the day she'd pulled him into her room and showed him her heavy chest- a white wedding dress, and underneath that, a silk robe of a bright red and gold, cranes flying across the long square sleeves.

“This was my mothers',” She told him, laying the kimono across the bed, “Your grandmother's. When we left for the camp, she hid this in the attic of our old house. We were so lucky- they wouldn't give us our house back after, of course, or the carnation fields or- but, they'd let us go up and check the attic. The new family, or maybe someone else before, they'd stolen everything else. But they hadn't checked the boards in the back, and oh Tony- Your grandmother wept so much.” She smoothed down wrinkles, lingering across the white feathers and orange beaks. “She was married in this dress, you know. Back in Japan, before- before everything.” she'd looked so wistful, staring at the yards of color stretched across her bed. “I wish- I wish you could have met them. That they could have met you.”

People like to say he's flashy- and he would never dissuade them from the idea. He takes pride in being seen, lives off it now, and he wouldn't be Tony Stark if he ever changed that. Its an assumption that the suit is an extension of that- and that may be true in it's own way, yes, but there's a larger part to it, something he can't form into words, because it's tied up in the feeling of silk and waves of shiny gold thread against red and the way those cranes flew up and up and up.

 

(When his parents die, they're cremated like they ask, but Tony finds out his mother wants-wanted, to be sent tp Kyoto, to where her extended family might be. Obie sets him aside and explains that she's better off next to her husband, right, that if they set Maria Stark's ashes in some Japanese family's house there will be talk, bad talk, and she'd worked so hard to place all that behind her, wouldn't be be kinder to herself and Tony to just avoid all that noise?

And Tony, 17 and grieving for something not fully formed, agrees, and he sits down at a house that's always been empty but now feels hollow, and looks at a birth certificate that reads Mariko Takahashi, mother Noriko, and a blank where a father would be. He stares at it, and at the wedding licenses next to it, Maria Carbonell, and he wonders when one became the other, if she ever did.)

 

Tony is a lot of things, but he is not an idiot. He has always known, in one way or another, that he was different. Intelligence was first- mouthing off at a distressingly young age, jumping past 'precocious' and straight into 'prodigy' with a burning trail of childhood behind him. Next came privilege- the idea of money and status sat abstract to him until he left for college, 12 years old and catching onto the way people look when they want something, expect it, try to manipulate for it. It's a sad thing, maybe, to become to bitter so young, but Howard scoffs and says the earliest the better, and Maria shakes her head and ignores problems the way she does best.

Another difference he starts to learn is Race. He meets Rhodey, right around his third year away, a bright young man with a heart for service and the patience of a saint. He likes Tony, calls him a brat and is awed by his brilliance in turn, and Tony feels a rush of- something, maybe, protective and fond and greedy, and when he asks Maria she only shakes her head and suggests the having a Friend may do that.

Which isn't- it sounds depressing, to say he'd never had a friend- but he knows it's true. The only kids hes ever met have been children of Howard's business partners, and even with Maria's hint to hang out with the Fujikawa kid (Rumiko, but call me Ru, she had told him with a whisper like a secret), he didn't linger on them, too busy and bright to hold himself back for their simple minds.

-But Rhodey is different, or maybe he's not, but either way Tony clings to him, always waiting for him or going out with him and generally sticking to his side.

It's a summer day, the period of almost-break that makes college students rush on projects and homework in-between the final exams, that Rhodey slams the door open to their dorm and snarls.

Tony had been building a- he doesn't actually know anymore, maybe a robot, maybe a sound-barrier breaking concept car- but he drops what he's doing, pushing goggles up and narrowly missing an eye with a soldering iron. “What, what's wrong, what's-”

“Fucking called me, a, a” and Rhodey's jerking his tie off, his shoes, throwing them away and looking like he wants to rip someone apart.

“Who called you? What?” Tony tries to rub away the grease on his face, surely messing it up. “Rhodey, what happened-”

“Fucking called me a Nigger!” Rhodey almost-shouts, throwing himself into a couch and rubbing his face. “Fucker called me a nigger, didn't even see his face, just drove off, fucking-”

Tony had never seen him so upset, so beside himself, and it's upsetting, and Tony doesn't even really comprehend half of what Rhodey's ranting about. “I... Rhodey, I just don't understand-”

Rhodey throws his lips up in a mean smirk, not even looking at at him “No, 'course you wouldn't, rich white boy sitting on a trust fund, Fuck!” And Rhodey rubs his face more, shutters out breaths like they hurt him. “Fuck, fucking shit, Tones, I don't mean that, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.”

And he sits there a few good minutes, trying to compose himself, and Tony watches him the whole time. And after a while, when Rhodey finally lets his hands down and takes a breath, when he finally looks at Tony and doesn't look like he'll kill someone, Tony lets out his own breath.

“I don't think I am.” Tony states, and Rhodey's tired and upset but he leans back in his chair and puts forth an inquisitive noise. “I don't think I'm...White, I mean. I don't think I'm white.”

Rhodey sits back up with confusion. “Wait, what?”

“My mom's Japanese, I know- Maybe not fully, I've never seen any pictures of her parents, but- She's at least half.” He doesn't look at Rhodey, choosing to carefully exam the threads of the cheap rug that sits in their shitty apartment. “I know she- she doesn't really look it, but she's had surgery. I've seen the scars.”

“Fuck, Tones,” Rhodey lets out. “You- I mean, and your dad...?”

Tony shrugs. “He's not Italian. He's lying.”

Rhodey rubs his face again. “That's fucked up, dude.”

Tony gives another shrug, finally meeting Rhodey's face. “Yeah, maybe. Hey, do you think you could recognize the guys' car? Cause we can totally find it and I can fuck up his engine six ways to Sunday.”

The do end up finding that car, and Tony makes sure the only way the guy could drive it would be Flintstones style, and as they walk home covered in grease and oil Tony has a roiling thought of what people might call him, if his eyes were slanted, or his name was Antonio.

Years down the line, Stark Industries is consistently named one of the best companies to work for. It's not even just for R & D or the sciences- they make the list for damn near every area of employment they offer, from janitorial and security to legal. And Tony takes a pride in that, in knowing his workers, his people, are happy and motivated. He's generous with vacation, with medical plans, even lets his factories in Japan shut down for New Years. Tony has a little book filled with pictures of chubby babies and weddings, of parties and funerals, notes in English but much more in Spanish and Japanese, thanking him for the opportunity to do whatever it was they did, and Tony will deny the actions till the day he dies, but he still takes the book out, much more after the suit is built, and looks at them with a guilt he doesn't think he could ever explain.

 

(Once, and only once, during the small window of time where MIT didn't have anything for him and his parents couldn't avoid him, he'd brought up The Subject.

“Where did your families come from?” He's lounging on the back of the sofa, feet kicked up and sipping on a rum and coke that is mostly rum, blatant and challenging to people who don't really give a fuck. His words are light, but he doesn't dare look at them, his mother putting on pearls and his father brushing his heavy fancy coat out.

“California,” Maria speaks, softly, and sometimes Tony wonders if she's lying to them or herself half the time.

“New York,” Howard grits, and edge to his words that always hits Tony like sandpaper, and Tony is so angry he just drops everything and leaves, and then a few months later the police are at his door, hats off and quiet, and then Tony doesn't remember a whole lot after that.)

 

Tony's 42 and he's a Trillionaire and an Empire and a Superhero and a Colossal Fuck Up, still a bundle of raw nerves and hair triggers even now, and when he meets Captain America it's a miracle it doesn't turn into a knock out brawl. If Tony were nicer he'd pull back, help the guy deal with unpacking a shit ton of emotional backlog from being literally frozen in time. The guy's little more then a kid, confused and upset and left adrift by forces that no one could even expect. If Tony were nice, he'd pull back, leave his own neuroses and issues behind and try to give the guy a hand up.

-But Tony is not nice, never had been, so he places his own hurts and issues first and he picks and prods until they're screaming at each other, Rogers' a wrong move away from smashing something and Tony giving the verbal approximation of a carpet bomb.

And even here Rogers' proves he's a true paragon of righteousness because he doesn't sock Tony in the face and instead just looks at him with eyes too old and heavy for someone his age, as if he'd been awake for every second in the ice, tired and worn and steadfast.

So when he asks, with only a little heat “What do you want, Stark?, that's- that's such a laughable question, isn't it, and it catches him off guard-

-because Steve Fucking Rogers is standing right in front of him, Technicolor muscle and hair and life, and Tony doesn't know how to part his rage long enough to explain that it was him, the idea of him, that good ole' American Dream, that drove his parents to such absurd and awfully laughable lengths. That Tony is almost half a century old and he's never managed to dig through Howard's burnt paper trail to find a hint of either family, that his mother hadn't' bothered to keep any record of her past and his father actively sought to erase it, and it'd been a gut punch when Cap had said 'Yo conosia a tu Padre, Tony', a little smile and just a hint of accent like he was making fun, except, except-

He wasn't. He wasn't- mocking Tony, he was just proving that he had known Howard, and Tony never had.

And whatever fire Tony had been fighting with is gone, and he sits down in one of the tens of empty conference room chairs, and just sighs. “Did he teach you Spanish?”

Cap's posture said he wasn't likely to throw a chair anymore. “...Yes. Did he...?”

And Tony bites out a 'No', looking up at Cap and seeing a sad, if understanding look- not pity, not regret, but an acceptance that feels both infinitely better and worse all at once.

 

(Tony's fist solid, concrete memory is of looking up at a vintage wartime poster of Captain Steve Rogers, full costume except for his helmet, which was held under a red and blue arm. He was beautiful, this big blond hero with a half smile and a faint blush across his pale cheeks. Howard, not yet bitter or cruel, or maybe just having a good day, had held Tony up to trace chubby hands across glass.

Another later memory was a Christmas where Howard was away for business and Maria had stayed back. She had a few drunks, a blush high on her cheeks, holding a growing Tony for what might have been the last time. “He was so handsome,” She whispered as they walked by the frame, Billy holiday crooning in the back. “You father said they stopped making this one- all the girls were too ready to steal them.” She sighed, breath strong of wine. “Your father made fun of him for that. I would've liked to have seen it.”

Tony has a lot of memories of that poster when Howard had screamed, or threatened, or punched or kicked. He remembers it being pointed to, of having to face it, of looking up at it from the ground.

“Why can't you be more like him?”

-And Tony was Tony, all too ready to turn around a force his way to the opposite point out of spite, dragging his feet against the very idea of being anything his father wanted and yet someone becoming all of it.

-But Tony remembers, for a brief period of time, looking up at that poster and wishing he was Steve Rogers, Big and Blond and Beautiful and a Hero.)

 

Nat King Cole is crooning away, voice tinny though the 'old' record player. In reality, it'd a high end speaker that currently plugged into a Stark phone, but the effect adds a undeniable charm that Tony won't even make fun of Steve's request for it. Right now, at least.

He sits on the couch with his completely non-alcoholic cocoa and watches, what is without a doubt, the most surreal thing he's ever witnessed. And Tony Stark, let it be known, has witnessed a shit-fuck ton of shit (as Clint would say).

Thor is currently stringing popcorn and dried cranberries together, a tiny needle held carefully in his massive fingers, Bruce holding the bowls and passing the next ones only after careful inspection. Besides them, Natasha is carefully unwrapping the hodgepodge assortment of trinkets and trimmings- some are souvenirs from far off places, some trashy gas station memorabilia, and some are the heavy and expensive orbs his Mother had, reds and golds glittering from the fire a few feet away.

Next to her feet is Clint, carefully examining each ornament like he was some sort of jewel appraiser. Piles form around him, with no discernible rhyme or reason, and Tony can't tell what will end up in the tree. He wears the finished end of the cranberry garland around his neck, Thor leaning over to drape as he goes.

And Steve, smiling, untangles the strands of lights with Bucky, even as the other complains that they haven't put the Menorah up, and that the twins are late getting the myriad of takeout orders they'd placed.

Then the music changes to something he hasn't heard in over 40 years, soft begging of shelter and journeys in a familiar Spanish verse, and Tony feels his heart seize up and his eyes grow warm, but no one notices except Steve, who just keeps smiling and hums along, even when Tony starts to softly sing along.

And no one cares that he knows all the words, or that there's a thin cake waiting to be rolled on the counter, or that Tony Stark's crying three days to Christmas over a Mexican Christmas song, because Clint had a breakdown for a week leading to Thanksgiving, and Bruce still sighs when the children toy commercials come on, and Natasha filches at The Nutcracker Suite and Steve avoided the last two Christmases all together-

And they're the island of misfit toys, broken but patched up and still good. And Tony breathes in, popcorn and pine-trees and the smell of fire, and then he lets go.

 

(Tony stands in front of a hundred reporters, sees his face on the live feed, and he realizes he is at the proverbial cross roads.

In front of him is a card neatly explaining away the events of last night- bodyguards and rouge robots and a hand wave of his own health. There is a Suit watching him, next to Pepper- there are Armed Forces also, one from each branch. There is a live mic in front of him, and the weight of Truth and Convenience is heavy on his bruised and battered shoulders.

Later, when asked, Tony can't really give a solid answer on why he did it. Part of it was his own selfish need to be a hero, maybe, and part of it was the sheer magnitude of everything coming together. He cites Stain's death, no longer a looming authority over his life, he cites a need for responsibility on his part, hell, he even calls it a midlife crisis.

-But really, he thinks more then anything, it was Inevitable, 40 years of lies finally ending in one spectacular blow out of a speech.

“Howard Stark was not Italian.” he states, and already the room is awash with murmurs and raised questions. Tony ignores them, instead focusing on his own last name etched into the glass doors far behind them. “He was a lot of things, sure, most of them things I wouldn't want to say in polite company- but, he was not Italian. I don't know what he was, really, because he took his family records to the grave. -But, I know my Mother, Maria.” He swallows, here, and his leg jumps in that up and down nervous tick. “Maria. She- she chose that name, when she left California. When she left her family, her history. Her name was Mariko.”

There are louder questions now, and the camera's are flashing in rapid succession. Tony focuses, still, on that name etched in the glass.

“You might be wondering why, during a press conference about some rather fantastical technology-based fighting and property damage, I'm bringing this up.” Here, Tony takes a breath, a deep one, and it's settles his bones and rests down deep in his chest, like it's the first breath he's taken in months, years even.

“It's because my parents lived on lies. They had there reasons, sure, but it was all lies. They thought that hiding who they were would mean getting to live up to what they were meant to be. And you know what? Maybe they were right. Maybe a Japanese Woman and a Latin-American Man couldn't have been part of the science movement of the century, of the Manhattan Project and the Wars and the Science Community as a whole. Maybe they did what they had to, to survive. It's something to admire- Surviving. I didn't really appreciate the idea until my little- uh- accident, over in the middle east. -But I can't think about anything else, lately. How will I survive the next big thing. How will I protect those who I hold dearest to me.

My parents did that by hiding. Whether right or wrong, I know the toll it took on them. How keeping secrets eats at you, turns you into a paranoid, angry monster. They survived, yeah, but the price is something I consider too high. So, here's where I am. I'm 40 years old, and I'm just finally realizing how much damage I've done to this world, whether personally or by proxy. I'm airing out stuff that should've been in the open from before I was even born. It is a good idea? Maybe, maybe not. But I've always been a selfish hedonistic bastard, and let me tell you, letting this all out feels pretty damn good.”

Tony has never said these exact words out loud, and he finds he like's how light they are. “So, to finish, Hi. I'm Anthony Edward Stark. My Mother was born Mariko Takahashi. My Father was a Latin Immigrant. And hey, just so we're all clear about it- I am Iron Man.”)


End file.
